He is not one of my favorite directors any way - the JFK thing was absurd. I think he had a lucky hit with "Platoon" an has been pretty much a joke ever since. This film is an actual joke. It was like "Springtime for Hitler" - the audience was laughing at stuff that was supposed to be serious. I really don't know if he was trying to make some political statement - he seemed to be expressing a lot of immature ideas on homosexuality that turned the whole subject into a cartoon. What most disappointed me was the knowledge that Mel Gibson could have taken the subject of Alexander's life and made a damn good movie out of it - Braveheart was everything this movie wasn't. I didn't read any reviews prior to going because I had read Stone supposedly spent 10 years making this thing, so I figured it must have some merit. It just plain sucked.